If Maria Miller, the culture secretary, has sat in as many conferences on the "future of news" as I have recently (and I hope for her sake she hasn't), then she might have hesitated before defining what kind of "press" would be affected by the oxymoronic draft royal charter on self-regulation of the press.

Pushed on Monday evening to have a stab at defining the entities that would fall under the new regulation, Miller made this parry: the "publisher would have to meet the three tests of whether the publication is publishing news-related material in the course of a business, whether their material is written by a range of authors – this would exclude a one-man band or a single blogger – and whether that material is subject to editorial control".

This is all about restraining a notion of the press and journalists as some kind of easily identified pack which feeds into a neatly industrialised process, when in fact the forces are moving in the opposite direction: anyone can be a journalist, yet the institutional support for journalism has seldom been economically weaker.

What Miller seems to want to define is a "news business", which fails to admit any complexity at all in the news ecosystem as it is presently constructed. Even if one ignores the fact that a "blog" is merely a publishing format, not a predetermined set of journalistic behaviours, one can't ignore what appears to be a fundamental technical illiteracy at the heart of the Leveson-inspired draft bill.

"The press" is melting before our very eyes, and "the public" it served is trickling away in a thousand different streams. The impact a story has now is as much dependent on the network it travels through as on the news brand that presents it. We knew about the attack that killed Osama bin Laden through a sole tweet, the network effect, input of a (non journalist) expert, and, finally, a White House press conference, rather than the other way round. We learned about Mitt Romney being disdainful of the 47% through amateur video that sat for several months on various publishing platforms before being more widely reported through Mother Jones, and independent news websites. If worthy stories find a circuitous route to the public now, so do unworthy stories.

The "sole blogger", or even a person in possession of a "microblogging" Twitter account, can have as devastating effect on any number of lives as the front page of a tabloid newspaper. Under Miller's definition of "press", the richest and most powerful publishers of all, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are arguably exempt because they do not seek to exercise "editorial control" or indeed report news as part of a business model. It would be interesting to know whether Miller views an algorithm as "editorial control". I suspect not, even though by most definitions it is just that. It was once the case that to reach a broad audience you needed an industrial publishing complex behind you, whereas now, you just need a mobile phone.

Why these definitions matter is core to the purpose of the bill. As it is constituted the press regulation royal charter is facing a historic problem of an entitled industry abusing its economic power, cultural reach and unhealthy relationship with the police. What the draft bill does not address at all is whether there are new concerns about privacy and protection that should be under consideration.

It is perfectly OK for Facebook to deploy a technology called "graph search", which allows you to see in an instant how people and objects are connected, (for instance, "show me everyone who attends Sandy Hook elementary school"), as this is not publishing news, but one can see how intrusion into privacy might be just as egregious through methods other than doorstepping by journalists.

Without making a single other judgment about the merit of the royal charter, it is possible to say that it still reflects a historic set of problems rather than faces serious attacks on both personal privacy and freedom of the press which will surely come in our connected society.